“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”

What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.

What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.

To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.